About the guides
Your Property Guide helps everyday Australians understand the costs and choices involved in buying and selling a home, with free guides, useful tools and a next-step plan for where you’re up to.
Why the guides exist
I started my career selling homes worth $10 million to $20 million across Australia. After two years I was head-hunted to advise property companies, and in the past five years my advice has generated over $4 billion in property sales.
What stayed with me is that the same questions matter at every price. What is the property likely to be worth, and what is the evidence? What will the move really cost? What is worth doing first, and who is each person working for?
Most people face those questions only a few times in their lives, often against a deadline. Your Property Guide sets out the answers plainly: free guides, calculators and a next-step plan for where you’re up to, whether you’re buying, selling or both.
When you want personal help, you can ask about an introduction to a participating agent. That’s always your choice, and we explain how it works, and how we’re paid, before anything is sent.
The aim is simple: help you understand your options, so you can work out what matters for your move.
Andy McMasterFounder, Your Property Guide
How we’re paid
Buyers and sellers pay nothing. When you ask, and tick the permission box, we introduce you to one participating agent who covers your area for each job you ask us to help with: a selling agent, or a buyer’s agent where we can. If we can’t cover your area, we tell you. The agent pays us a flat fee for the introduction. It’s not a share of their commission, and they pay it whether or not you go ahead with them.
That fee comes out of their pocket, not yours. It doesn’t change what you pay: you agree any commission or fee directly with them. We disclose this on every introduction. We never sell your details, and we never pass your request to a second agent. We don’t accept fees from anyone we wouldn’t use ourselves. And the data, guides, calculators and suburb profiles stay free regardless.
Your Property Guide is owned and operated by AM Marketing Group Pty Ltd trading as Your Property Guide Australia, an Australian-registered private company. We’re independently funded. No venture capital, no media-group ownership, no real estate franchise or aggregator behind the scenes.
Our revenue comes from introduction fees paid by the agents we introduce people to. When you ask to be connected with an agent, your details go to one agent only, and they pay us a flat fee for that introduction. It’s not a share of their commission, and it doesn’t depend on a sale or job going ahead. No advertising. No paid placements in editorial. No fees from any party we wouldn’t recommend to our own family. Partner relationships are disclosed on every introduction form and in every introduction email.
How we check agents
One introduction for each service you ask about, checked by us. Here’s what each check means, and how to look any agent up yourself.
We review their recent sales in the suburbs they want introductions for, not just an office nearby.
We read their reviews from past sellers or buyers, not just the ones they choose to show.
We look them up on their state’s licence register before they join, and you can too (links below).
We talk to every agent about how they work before they join. They agree to contact you promptly and tell us what happened.
Check any agent’s licence on their state’s register
Every guide carries the byline of the person who wrote it and the name of the editor who reviewed it.
Founder and editor
Andy started his career selling homes worth $10 million to $20 million across Australia.
After two years he was head-hunted to advise property companies.
In the past five years his advice has generated over $4 billion in property sales.
Andy edits every guide on the site and signs it off before it publishes. If you spot something that doesn’t meet that standard, his inbox is the right place to flag it.
Property & finance writer
Senior writer. Writes about property tax, lending, investment strategy, federal & state policy
Bec is our senior writer on the tax, lending and investment side of property. She came to Your Property Guide from a mortgage broking background, where she spent several years walking first home buyers and seasoned investors through the mechanics of structuring, serviceability and tax-efficient ownership.
On the site she covers negative gearing, capital gains tax, depreciation, SMSF property, foreign buyer rules, and the federal and state policy changes that move the market. She’s the writer behind most of our budget coverage and the calculators that underpin it.
Her brief is to translate complex tax and lending detail into plain English without losing the nuance that actually changes the numbers on a deal.
Market & suburb research
Senior writer. Writes about capital-city market updates, suburb profiles, state buying guides, regional research
Ellie leads our market and suburb research. Her background is in property data journalism, pulling apart Valuer-General releases, ABS data, and listing-portal aggregates to find the story behind the median.
She writes the capital-city market updates, state-by-state buying guides, regional research and most of the suburb profiles on the site. Every figure she publishes carries a source and an as-of date, and her drafts get reviewed by the editor before they go live.
Ellie’s priority is making sure the data on Your Property Guide is current, comparable, and useful, not just pretty.
Every guide goes through the same three steps: a draft is prepared with AI assistance against a published outline, a domain reviewer (broker, agent, accountant or conveyancer depending on topic) sanity-checks the technical claims, and the editor signs off on plain-English clarity. Drafts are not published until all three steps are complete and signed off.
Sources. Suburb data is sourced from state Valuer-General offices, ABS Census, Geoscience Australia, OpenStreetMap, the Bureau of Meteorology, ACARA, state police open data, and state planning portals. Every figure on a suburb page carries a tooltip showing the source and the as-of date. Guides cite primary sources (ATO rulings, state legislation, APRA/ASIC regulatory guidance, MFAA / HIA / Master Builders industry data) and never opinion blogs.
AI usage. Our guides are drafted with AI assistance, then checked and edited by Andy McMaster, our founder and editor, before they’re published. Nothing goes live without his sign-off.
Updates. Guides are reviewed at least annually, and immediately after any material law or scheme change (state budget changes, Home Guarantee Scheme changes, RBA rate decisions, ATO determinations). Each guide shows the published date and the last-reviewed date in the byline.
The sources behind every suburb figure, and the rule that withholds one, are on the methodology page.
We write for every Australian engaging with residential property. First home buyers, upgraders, downsizers, sellers, investors, renovators and renters. Every guide is tested for plain-English accessibility (no jargon left unexplained), and we’re explicit when advice differs by state, by age, by income, or by family situation.
Our editorial priorities are set by reader search demand (what Australians are actually looking up) and topic under-coverage in existing Australian property media (questions buyers ask their broker and don’t find published anywhere). Our editor reviews coverage gaps quarterly and commissions new guides against them.
If you spot a factual error, a stale figure, or a number that doesn’t match its source, email andy@theandylife.com. The editor reads every correction request and we commit to:
For broader feedback, topics we should cover, gaps in our guides or suggestions for the data, use our contact form or email the editor directly.